Under the influence of the medication crucial to her existence, the narrator--like Konigsdorf herself suffering from a degenerative disease--is visited and prodded into an examination of her life by an apparition of Lise Meitner, the Jewish physicist who helped discover atomic fission but was forced to flee Germany before Kristallnacht. Reflecting on her roles as lover, wife, mother, and woman, the narrator asks: How much have I done? Enough? What is left in the end? What will last?